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For some time, there were no Starks in Winterfell. Now there are two.
In "The Queen’s Justice," Bran Stark finally returned home, reuniting with his sister, Sansa, who is currently in charge of the North. The happy reunion didn’t last long; Sansa is quickly shaken by her brother’s cold manner.
Speaking under the Godswood, Sansa tells Bran that as Ned’s only living trueborn son, he is now the Lord of Winterfell. Bran responds, "I can never be Lord of Winterfell. I can never be Lord of anything. I am the Three-Eyed Raven."
"I don’t know what that means," Sansa replies.
"It’s difficult to explain. … It means I can see everything. Everything that’s ever happened to everyone," Bran says. "Everything that’s happening right now. It’s all pieces now. Fragments. I need to learn to see better. When the long night comes again, I need to be ready."
When this answer understandably confuses Sansa, Bran illustrates his abilities by describing and apologizing for the night that Sansa was raped by Ramsay Bolton, an event for which Bran was not physically present.
Shocked, Sansa gets up and heads back to the castle. After waiting years to see her brother again, she has found an emotionless stranger in his place.
"It’s like imagining you have all of space and time in your head," Isaac Hempstead-Wright, who plays Bran, told Entertainment Weekly. "Bran is existing in thousands of planes of existence at any one time. So it’s quite difficult for Bran to have any kind of semblance of personality anymore because he’s really like a giant computer."
On this week’s episode of Talk the Thrones, the team discussed the encounter.
Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.
